Dinah, ClinkShrink, & Roy produce Shrink Rap: a blog by Psychiatrists for Psychiatrists. A place to talk; no one has to listen.
All patient vignettes are confabulated; the psychiatrists, however, are mostly real.
--Topics include psychotherapy, humor, depression, bipolar, anxiety, schizophrenia, medications, ethics, psychopharmacology, forensic and correctional psychiatry, psychology, mental health, chocolate, and emotional support ducks. Don't ask. (It's not Shrink Wrap.)

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

I want to thank all of the people who commented on my post What is Bipolar Disorder. Your comments were tremendously helpful. The descriptions of what it feels like to have this illness were incredible-- vivid, heartfelt, almost a mix of poetry and misery-- the stories were told in a way that I don't often hear in clinical settings. So, thank you. And if you're someone who doesn't read the comment section of blogs, I would urge you to make an exception for this post. The comments speak to what an intelligent, educated, and articulate readership we are lucky enough to have join us here, and the commenters make the experience of difficult mood states come alive in a way it is so hard to do with words. A little bickering (it wouldn't be Shrink Rap without that!), but I want to point out that the issues that inspired the bickering are exactly the concerns we address in figuring out the usefulness of the expanded bipolar diagnosis.

That said, I wrote my article for Clinical Psychiatry News, called Rethinking Bipolarity. If you click the link at the end, it will cycle you back to the What is Bipolar post. Let me know how I did?

And thank you, again. Thank you also to Dr. Dean MacKinnon, of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center and author of Trouble in Mindfor previewing the article for me.

Very well written.How does a clinician decide on making a bipolar II (or bipolar spectrum diagnosis)? Is it preferable to over diagnose or under diagnose patients? If a patient responds to lithium and goes haywire with SSRIs, does this indicate a bipolar disorder?

I believe Dr. David Healy in his book, MANIA: A SHORT HISTORY OF BIPOLAR DISORDER, does one of the best jobs of exposing that this explosion of what used to be the very rare manic depressive illness from which most people recovered with no drugs to a huge fraud fad change to the name "bipolar disorder" with enough expanded "symptoms" included so that anyone could qualify at stressful times in their lives came about due to BIG PHARMA's latest fraudulent ad ploy to use this bogus life destroying stigma to push its epileptic drugs like Depakote and Neurontin and the global multibillion dollar lethal atypical antipsychotics on millions of people with the use of force and law from the cradle to the grave. Paid drug company shills like "Dr." ADHD BIPOLAR Biederman have been exposed for single handedly creating the child bipolar epidemic showing the U.S. has lost its moral compass to abuse children in this way for greed, power, profit, status and social control.

Check out books like THE MYTH OF THE CHEMICAL CURE, RETHINKING PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS, THE PERFECT CRIME, YOUR DRUG MAY BE YOUR PROBLEM and countless others showing these poison drugs cause brain damage and many diseases that result in early death by up to 25 years. This is one of many bogus, invented, VOTED in so called disorders of the junk science DSM to promote bogus biological psychiatry bought out completely by BIG PHARMA. Yes, people have life problems, stressors, crises, traumas, but medicalizing them has done far more harm than good by blaming the victims and ignoring social inequalities, prejudices and other injustices to maintain the status quo for the power elite including psychiatry.